


The Loneliest Boy In New York

by WatchMyFavesSuffer



Series: Loneliest Boy In New York//Chuck Bass Drabbles [1]
Category: Gossip Girl (TV 2007)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, BIG CW for CSA, Body Dysmorphic Disorder, Depression, Drabble, Drug Use, Dubious Consent, F/M, In my literary imagination the pilot never happened, Whump, so i can appreciate chucks character and he isnt a complete piece of garbage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-29
Updated: 2020-07-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:22:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25584343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WatchMyFavesSuffer/pseuds/WatchMyFavesSuffer
Summary: Chuck Bass isn’t sure if he’s the best person on earth or the worst, but he’s pretty sure it’s one of the two. It’s something he’s been trying to figure out.Self-indulgent Chuck angst with light Blair/Chuck.(set around s2e24)
Relationships: Chuck Bass/Blair Waldorf
Series: Loneliest Boy In New York//Chuck Bass Drabbles [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2001481
Comments: 6
Kudos: 26





	The Loneliest Boy In New York

Chuck Bass isn’t sure if he’s the best person on earth or the worst, but he’s pretty sure it’s one of the two. It’s something he’s been trying to figure out.

If asked to describe himself, he would probably use the words “devilish”, “debonair”, and “dashing” because he _is,_ and also because he has a way with words and appreciates the alliteration.

And it isn’t even _bragging_ , really, to say he’s the best. With all the money and privilege he has, he had better be. He buys the best clothes, rides in the best limousine, and drinks the best scotch. He paid for the best SAT scores, and has the best, most fashionable political opinions to break out at cocktail parties (and because it’s all so remote, so entirely free of conviction, he can change his opinions whenever it suits him.)

But he gets in these dark spaces, obscure corners of his mind he doesn’t remember opening the door to and can’t find his way out of. It’s like looking through the wrong end of the telescope. And when he gets like that, everything good about him seems so hollow and artificial, and all his faults contrastingly concrete and immediate. His charms are irrelevant: who needed to be charming when more than enough people would sleep with him just for his money? His intelligence is undermined by his complete lack of focus or discipline, his good looks elusive and hard to see. In fact, when he looks at his own face in the mirror, it repulses him. He stares into his own knife-blade eyes until he becomes unfamiliar, grotesque. He pulls the skin of his face this way and that, trying to shape it into something he can recognize. With his hands on his face, he realized how _smooth_ his skin is, preternaturally smooth, like the feet of a baby who hadn’t touched the ground yet. Would Chuck ever be allowed to touch the ground? And would it have to come at the end of a long, long fall?

Bart Bass was such a towering figure, it almost never occurred to Chuck that he would die one day. Like, if the Great Bart Bass had gotten cancer, you could almost imagine him offering the disease a mid seven-figure sum and the cancer fucking right off. Or Bart just giving his tumor a particularly menacing glare and watching it wither away. But it turns out even Bass money and the Bass iron will can’t stop tons of metal and glass from colliding and shattering— and pulverizing human bodies in the process.

Hearing about the accident was like running into a brick wall that suddenly popped up in his path. Pure shock and an all-over, _physical_ pain.

He didn’t sleep much in those weeks. Or if he did, he didn’t remember it. It wouldn’t have been _sleep_ , per se, more like his eyes and brain, saturated in alcohol, abruptly quitting on him.

He is flat on his back in a hotel room, too drunk to move, with his eyes and mouth gritty and dry, when it occurs to him. He’s been holding his breath his whole life, waiting for the day his father would give him a sign. A word, a touch, something he didn’t _buy,_ to show that he loved him. Bart ignored him, scorned him, expressed his disappointment in his son basically without fail for almost 18 years. But Chuck always thought that maybe one day they would have a real relationship. That scrap of hope was always there as long as they were both alive, and Chuck could always nurture and covet that dream of feeling loved. But now he was dead, and the reason why it hurt so bad was because now, it would never happen.

Maybe it would have, eventually, if Bart had lived. All he could do now was sift through his memories, like looking for a lost necklace in a sandbox, on his hands and knees trying to parse out indications of love or hatred or indifference.

But really, who is he kidding? Who could love _him_?

Bart Bass was a tough bastard— difficult to please, cold, capricious. But he saw Chuck for what he was: nothing serious, nothing special. A rich boy on an extended temper tantrum, behaving badly and causing problems for everyone else to clean up. Dilettante playboy at best, disgusting animal at worst.

And if he was gone, who could _see_ Chuck? Who knew him? Even if his father made him feel like trash, at least Chuck knew he _existed_. Now, who cared whether Chuck woke up each morning or whether he made it home at night? His father might have cared for the wrong reasons, but at least he _cared_. He knew Chuck, had known him his whole life— and maybe he didn’t _want_ his son, but he never abandoned him. That must have meant Chuck was worth… _something,_ right?

He is too drunk to remember much about the funeral, but he remembers snarling at Dan, at Lily, blaming everyone else for his father’s death. The projection was so obvious it was laughable. _He_ had been the one to call Bart and tell him to come to the ball. If he’d never made that call, his father would be alive.

And hey, he killed his mother, right? Why not throw his father on the body count, too?

On a rooftop, he tries saying it to no one, to the empty night. “I’m Chuck Bass and I killed both my parents.”

He laughs, because it’s sort of funny when he says it like that, and because he’s very, very high and the sound of his own voice is hilarious right now.

He says it louder: “I’m Chuck Bass! My parents died and it’s all my fault!”

And then he jumps up on the roof’s ledge. He sloshes scotch on his Armani suit in the process, and yells until he’s hoarse. “I’M CHUCK BASS AND ANYONE WHO COULD HAVE LOVED ME IS DEAD!”

Nothing but a faint echo answers him. Silence falls on the skyline. He laughs again when he realizes he now owns about half of the buildings he sees.

It’s a cavernous, empty feeling, knowing you are unloved in this world. Alcohol fills the emptiness nicely, if only for a few moments. So does anonymous sex with lots of women, always older, always beautiful. He wonders if they know how old he is. He wonders if they care. Somewhere between Thailand and the Netherlands, he mixes ketamine with Viagra. He can’t move, but he’s hard as hell and surrounded by escorts. So he lets the women (and there might have been men, because who cares at that point?) do what they will, while he hovers somewhere outside his body.

Sometimes, Chuck feels guilty for how much sex he has. Not out of any quaint Puritan morality, or any Waldorf-esque need to be pure. But because sometimes he feels like everyone he fucks, he poisons.

The first time anyone touched Chuck’s dick besides himself was in middle school, when his au pair sucked him off. He remembers washing his hands again and again in the bathroom of a penthouse suite afterward, scrubbing under his nails, and still not feeling clean. He thought maybe she had introduced some subtle, insidious disease into his bloodstream. He brushed his teeth so hard he spit blood, but he still felt vaguely _infected_. Soiled and crumpled, like a used handkerchief. But it had felt _good_ , really good, in the moment. Gina, his au pair, was beautiful. Like someone in a magazine, or a movie. So he was lucky, wasn’t he?

He hopes to God that Blair didn’t feel like that when he took her virginity. He wonders if she scrubbed her hands like he did, like Lady Macbeth, gorgeous and mad and guilty.

When he is tripping balls and kissing his way down some stripper’s stomach in Amsterdam, he swears he sees his hands covered in ink in the dim light, leaving ugly black marks everywhere he touches.

Which is why he has to run away from Blair. Because her hair is soft, and the nape of her neck smells so clean and sweet, and falling asleep beside her feels like home— anything that sweet has nothing to do with Chuck. All he can do for her is infect her, ruin her, make her as bitter and twisted and unclean as him, and she doesn’t deserve that. And worse, because he knows there is almost nothing he can do that will make her abandon him. The worst thing he’d ever done, the darkest thought to ever flicker through his mind, she had promised to stay with him through it all. And even if that’s true, even if she stays no matter what she sees in him, then he’d have to face the fact that he needs her, really needs her, and that to lose her would destroy him. And no one has that kind of power over him. Not since Bart died.

The day he lets Blair go, tells her to go be with Nate, he has the limo driver take him to Riverside Park. He thanks the driver, which he hasn’t done since he was a child, and tells him to head back home, he’ll walk. It’s a windy day in early spring, and his coat isn’t warm enough. The cold stings, but the pain fits the moment. He sits on a railing and looks out on the river. He’s Chuck Bass: evil genius, child billionaire, son of greatness— and what does he have to show for it?


End file.
